Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a moment of literary exchange, collaboration, translation, and experiment between the poles of the Maghreb and Levant. "Global Form, Regional Exchange" reconstitutes the literary systems that authors created to connect two avant-garde movements -- Souffles-Anfas in Morocco and the "60's generation" in Iraq -- to the regional hub for Arabic literary print culture, Beirut. It tracks practices of translation (between French, Arabic, and English) that authors like Sargon Boulus and Abdellatif Laabi, on opposite sides of the region, developed to renew Arabic literature, attending to instances of 'linguistic terrorism' and deployments of untranslatability; theories of a global Arabic; and efforts to emulate the linguistic standards of the Levantine avant-garde. Finally, through a reading of Algerian author Kateb Yacine's work with Beirut-based journals, this article argues for a brief and understudied moment of experiment with Maghrebi literature in standardized Arabic.